Wimbledon Cakes

Oh yessss it’s that time of year again! I’ve swiftly moved on from pretending to care about the football to wholeheartedly getting excited about Wimbledon. It starts today and I’m so looking forward to enjoying the tennis, drinking Pimms and eating strawberries and cream. Last year to celebrate I made these, but this year I wanted to go for something a little bigger. I picked up a couple of these tins and was inspired to make some slightly larger than life tennis ball cakes filled with fresh strawberry buttercream. I used a basic vanilla cake recipe to make 8 cake halves for 4 tennis balls. Once baked, I left them to chill in the fridge overnight so they would be easier to cut. To make the halves fit together better I trimmed the flat tops and edges so they would be spherical. I made sure to cut a tiny bit off the top of one of the halves so they would each stand up without rolling over. Then using a spoon I scooped out a bit of the inside to make room for the filling. For the frosting filling I beat some fresh strawberries into some vanilla buttercream and then folded in some larger pieces. I heaped the filling so when I put the other half on top the whole centre would be full of frosting. I covered the whole ball in a thin layer of vanilla buttercream so that the fondant could be stuck to it. After chilling it in the fridge for 20 minutes I covered the ball in yellow fondant and smoothed it using these which I’ve just discovered! They have totally changed my life. To decorate I made the stripes using white flower paste and placed it on a 5 inch cake board covered in royal icing ‘grass’. To finish I used a purple ribbon so it would look like the signature green and purple of Wimbledon. While it doesn’t compare to last year’s Wimbledon final, cutting into it and seeing the strawberry pink centre was still pretty damn exciting.